60 free Gulliver's Travels trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Gulliver's Travels trivia quiz takes all four voyages in turn. Lilliput brings the six-inch people, the egg-cracking schism, the high heels and low heels, the captured fleet and the palace fire put out in the least dignified way possible. Brobdingnag brings the 72-foot farmer, Glumdalclitch, the travelling box and the eagle. The third voyage covers the flying island, the sunbeam-from-cucumber projectors of Lagado, the ghosts of Glubbdubdrib and the immortal struldbrugs, and the fourth brings the horses and the Yahoos. The rest is about Swift and the book's afterlife: why the manuscript was copied in another hand, the publisher who cut the dangerous bits, the Scriblerus Club, Pope's verses, Thackeray's outrage, big-endian and little-endian, Miyazaki's flying castle, Telemann's suite and Jack Black. There are questions on Stella, Ménière's disease and the deanery of St Patrick's for good measure. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel, its author, Lilliput, Laputa, Brobdingnag and the Yahoos, and each explanation adds one detail worth passing on. It suits book clubs, students of satire and anyone who has ever cracked an egg at the wrong end.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was Gulliver's Travels first published?
1726
It came out anonymously in London and was an immediate success, with imitations, parodies and 'keys' following within months.
Q 02What is Gulliver's first name?
Lemuel
The full original title runs on for a whole sentence, beginning Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts.
Q 03What was Gulliver's profession before he became a ship's captain?
Surgeon
He sails as a ship's surgeon on the first voyages and only takes command of a merchantman in Part IV, out of boredom.
Q 04What is the name of the ship wrecked in a storm on Gulliver's first voyage?
The Antelope
It was bound for the East Indies and hit a violent storm north-west of Van Diemen's Land, today's Tasmania.
Q 05Roughly how tall are the Lilliputians?
Less than 6 inches
They are one-twelfth human height; their neighbours across the channel are the same size and just as quarrelsome.
Q 06What trivial question divides the two warring religious sects of Lilliput?
Which end of a boiled egg to crack open
Freud's phrase 'the narcissism of small differences' has been applied to the resulting war; computer scientists later borrowed the sects' names too.
Q 07What are the two rival Lilliputian political parties, parodies of the Tories and Whigs, distinguished by?
The height of their heels
The Tories were the High-Heels and the Whigs the Low-Heels; the emperor's heir hedges by wearing one heel higher than the other.
Q 08Which rival island nation's fleet does Gulliver capture for Lilliput?
Blefuscu
The two islands stand for Britain and France, separated by a channel 800 yards wide; Gulliver's refusal to conquer the rival outright turns the emperor against him.
Q 09What unorthodox method does Gulliver use to put out a fire in the Lilliputian palace?
He urinates on it
The act is listed among his crimes when he is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded.
Q 10What punishment is Gulliver sentenced to in Lilliput before he escapes?
Blinding
The sentence parodies the impeachment of the Tory ministers Harley and Bolingbroke, who had made peace with France.
Q 11Which Lilliputian official is usually read as a caricature of Sir Robert Walpole?
Flimnap, the lord high treasurer
Swift had a personally turbulent relationship with the Whig statesman, and the whole first part is his most political.
Q 12What is the name of the land of giants Gulliver reaches on his second voyage?
Brobdingnag
The word Brobdingnagian sits in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for gigantic; the grass there is as tall as trees.
Q 13Roughly how tall is the farmer who finds Gulliver in the land of giants?
About 72 feet
Q 21The Grand Academy of Lagado satirises which real institution?
The Royal Society
Swift mocks the blind pursuit of science without practical results and the bureaucracy that funds it.
Q 22On the island of Glubbdubdrib, whom does Gulliver converse with?
The ghosts of historical figures
The magician summons Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle and Descartes for a debate on ancients versus moderns.
Q 23What are the struldbrugs of Luggnagg?
People who are immortal but still age
Gulliver works it out from the man's ten-yard stride; the giants are about twelve times human size, mirroring the Lilliputians.
Q 14What is the name of the giant farmer's daughter who becomes Gulliver's nurse and companion?
Glumdalclitch
She is nine and 'small for her age' at not above forty feet; she follows Gulliver into the queen's service.
Q 15What does the farmer do with Gulliver before selling him to the queen?
Exhibits him for money as a curiosity
The constant display makes Gulliver ill; the queen then has a portable 'travelling box' built for him.
Q 16What carries Gulliver's travelling box off and drops it into the sea, ending his stay among the giants?
A giant eagle
Earlier a monkey had carried him to a roof and a jealous court dwarf had loosed giant wasps on him.
Q 17What especially horrifies the giant king in Gulliver's account of Europe?
The use of guns and cannon
James Gillray's 1803 print recast the scene with George III as the giant king peering at a tiny Napoleon.
Q 18What is Laputa, the setting of the third voyage?
A flying island
It is about four and a half miles across and floats by magnetic levitation on an adamantine base.
Q 19How does Laputa punish rebellious cities below it?
By hovering over them and dropping rocks
The cut episode of the rebel city Lindalino was Swift's allegory of Dublin resisting William Wood's debased copper coinage.
Q 20Which absurd project is under way at the Grand Academy of Lagado?
Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers
Others include softening marble for pillows and detecting conspiracies by examining suspects' excrement.
They lack eternal youth, suffer every infirmity of age and are declared legally dead at eighty.
Q 24Which real country does Gulliver visit at the end of his third voyage?
Japan
He asks the Emperor to excuse him from the ceremony of trampling on the crucifix that was demanded of Dutch traders.
Q 25What are the Houyhnhnms?
Intelligent, civilised horses
Swift inverts the old textbook definition of man as the rational animal by making horses reasonable and humans brutes.
Q 26What are the Yahoos?
Savage, filthy human-like creatures
Swift coined the word, and it now means a crude, brutish person; the creatures dig in mud for 'pretty stones'.
Q 27Why does Gulliver end up in the land of the horses?
His crew mutinies and sets him adrift
The mutineers turn pirate; the horses' assembly later expels him as a dangerous Yahoo with a semblance of reason.
Q 28Which kindly Portuguese captain rescues Gulliver against his will at the end of the book?
Pedro de Mendez
Gulliver is disgusted to find that a 'Yahoo' can be wise and generous; critics still argue over what Swift meant by him.
Q 29How does Gulliver spend his time after returning home from his last voyage?
Talking to the horses in his stables
He cannot bear to live among 'Yahoos', avoids his wife and family and becomes a recluse.
Q 30Which real captain does Gulliver name as inviting him aboard for the disastrous third voyage?
Robinson
The book came out seven years after Robinson Crusoe and can be read as a point-by-point rebuttal of Defoe's optimism.